THE STORY OF THE AMIfERICAN INDIAN, THE STORY OF THE A4MERICA.N SAILOR,
THE STORY OF THE AMERICAIN SOLDIER, HISTORIC BOYS, HISTORIC
GIRLS, IN LEISLER'S TIMES, ETC., ETC

FULLY ILLUSTRATED

BOSTON
D LOTHROP COMPANY
WASHINGTON STREET OPPOSITE BROMFIELD

COPYRIGHT, 1891,
BY
D. LOTHROP COMPANY.

PREFACE.

THE story of the UnitedStates of America has already been told and re-told
for young Americans by competent writers, and yet there is room for another
re-telling. To avoid as far as possible the dreary array of dates and the dull
succession of events that may make up the history but do not tell the story-to
awaken an interest in motives as well as persons, in principles rather than in
battles, in the patriotism and manliness that make a people rather than in the
simply personal qualities that make the leader or the individual, is the aim of the
writer of this latest "Story." The future of the Republic depends on the up-
bringing of the boys and girls of to-day. Any new light on the doings of the
boys and girls of America's past when they grew to manhood and womanhood
should be of service to the boys and girls of America's to-day and to-morrow.
The hope that this volume may help as such a light has inspired its author to
write as concisely and as simply as he is able the story of the great Republic's
origin, development and growth from the far-off days of Columbus the discoverer
to the nobler times of Washington the defender and Lincoln the savior of
America's liberties.
BosToN, August, 1891. E. S. B.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD

CHAPTER II.

COLUMBUS THE ADMIRAL

CHAPTER III.
THE NAMING OF AMERICA .

CHAPTER IV.
SPAIN AND HER RIVALS

CHAPTER V.
HOMES IN THE NEW WORLD

CHAPTER VI.
THE FIRST COLONISTS

CHAPTER VII.
HOW THEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS.

CHAPTER VIII.
FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN

CHAPTER IX.
WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY

CHAPTER X.
"THE LAST STRAW "

CHAPTER XI.
THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM

CHAPTER XII.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 109

CHAPTER XIV.
STARTING OUT IN LIFE .

CHAPTER XV.
STHE AMERICANS" 130

CHAPTER XVI.
UNSETTLED DAYS 141

CHAPTER XVII.
A WRESTLE WITH THE OLD FOE. 152

CHAPTER XVIII.
STATE-MAKING 161

CHAPTER XIX.
CITIZENS AND PARTIES 70

CHAPTER XX.
CHANGING DAYS 8o

CHAPTER XXI.
THE SHADOW OF DISCORD 189

CHAPTER XXII.
FOR UNION. 202

CHAPTER XXIII.
A FIGHT FOR LIFE 213

CHAPTER XXIV.
A REUNITED NATION 223

CHAPTER XXV.
AFTER AN HUNDRED YEARS 23

CHAPTER XXVI.
GROWING INTO GREATNESS 239

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

The Minute Men of the Revolution Frontis.
Christopher Columbus .
A dream of Cathay 10
The Laurentian Rocks of the Adiron-
dack region .
" When monstrous-toed birds waded in
the Charles" 13
An early American 14
The red Americans 15
A war chief of the Mound Builders 18
The canoes with wings .19
The landing of Columbus 20
The young Columbus .21
Amerigo Vespucci. 28
De Soto. .30
In sight of Mexico. 31
A Conquistadore 32
Coronado's march 33
Sir Francis Drake 35
Sir Walter Raleigh 36
"Elbowing off" 38
James I. 39
Queen Elizabeth 40
Disputing for possession 41
Captain John Smith 43
Powhatan 44
Prince Charles 45
William Penn, the Younger .45
A palisaded fort 48
Suspicious of Indians 49
Dutch windmill in old New York .

Settlers from Holland approaching New
Amsterdam
Cavalier and Puritan
La Salle
Longing for the old home
An old landmark .
Going to school in 1700.
The whirring spinning-wheel
Stopping the post-rider .
In the chimney-corner
The clearing .
On the watch .
" I would rather be carried out dead I "
said Stuyvesant
Champlain and the Iroquois
In treaty with the Iroquois
" A witch "
A fight with pirates
New York in 169 o.
One of King James' advisers.
In the cabin of the Mayflower
One of the villagers
A lesson in liberty .
King James II.
In Leisler's times .
The people and the Royal go',ernor
A smuggler.
Guarding the port .
The right of search
The hated stamps .
Preparing for homespun clothes

LIST OF ILL USTRATIONS.

Unwelcome lodgers 90
A weak-kneed patriot and her sly cup of
tea .92
Samuel Adams 93
Paul Revere's ride 94-
The bridge at Concord 96
The British are coming 97
"It rained rebels" 99
Ethan Allen .
" The rebels are fortifying Bunker Hill 102
General George Washington. .05
A Continental" o6
One of the French soldiers o6
Anthony Wayne 107
John Paul Jones o8
French's statue of the Minute Man 109
Dr. Benjamin Franklin .
John Adams prophesying the glorious
Fourth". 112
The Liberty Bell 114
In Marion's camp 115
The Boston Boys and General Gage 118
Threats of resistance to taxation 120
Inkstand used in signing the Constitution 121
Alexander Hamilton 123
George Washington 127
The inauguration of President Wash-
ington 129
George Rogers Clarke 131
"Borrowing fire in old days 132
" King Cotton 33
The stage coach 133
Martha Washington .35
Daniel Boone 136
The new home in the Ohio country 137
Washington's home at Mount Vernon 41
Training recruits for war with France 142
John Adams 143
Thomas Jefferson 145
Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon 146

The sale of Louisiana
The falling flag
James Madison
Tecumseh, chief of the Shawnees
The battle of Tippecanoe
Andrew Jackson
The ruined White House
Keeping the old flag afloat
Jackson's sharpshooters at New Orleans
Ambushed in the Indian country
The Conastoga wagon .
The mail boat on the Ohio
An old-time Louisiana sugar mill
James Monroe
Ashland, the home of Henry Clay.
Discussing the tariff in 1828 .
A Western flat-boat
John Quincy Adams
De Witt Clinton.
The railway coach of our grandfathers
When every man was his own cobbler
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
Daniel Webster
The traveling schoolmaster
Andrew Jackson .
Martin Van Buren.
William Henry Harrison
John Tyler
Anti-renters, disguised as Indians, am-
bushing the sheriff .
James K. Polk
At Buena Vista
Zachary Taylor
Millard Fillmore.
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan.
Dinah Morris's certificate of freedom
Among the sugar cane .
Great seal of the Confederacy" .

LIST OF ILL USTRA TIONS.

Abraham Lincoln .
Seal of the United States
Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor
A Louisiana tiger .
In the enlistment office .
Charge of the Union troops at Gettysburg
The turret of the Monitor
Working for the soldiers
The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln
Home again .
Andrew Johnson. .
The Capitol of the United States .
Ulysses Simpson Grant .
Old French market, New Orleans .

ANY hundreds of years ago there lived in ancient Greece
a certain wise man whose name was Pythagoras. As a
boy he had been brought up beside the blue Egean Sea.
r11: ,i He learned to observe carefully.. He became a traveler
and a teacher and from the closest study of all the things
around him-the earth and sky, the sun and stars, the rise and
fall of tides, the changes of the seasons and all the every-day
happenings of this wonderful world of ours--he announced as
his belief a theory that men called ridiculous but which, to-day,
every boy and girl beginning the study of geography accepts with-
out question. The earth," said Pythagoras to his pupils, is
spherical and inhabited allover."
That was fully twenty-five hundred years ago and yet,
after nearly two thousand years had passed, a certain ,-,
Italian sailor whose name was Christopher Columbus and
who believed as did the old Grecian scholar, made the i
same statement before a council of the most learned men
of Spain and was laughed to scorn. This Italian is
crazy," they said. "Why, if the earth is round the people

THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD.

on the other side would be walking about with their heels above
their heads; all the trees would grow upside down and the ships
must sail up hill. It is absurd.
All the world knows that the
earth is flat."
But this Italian sailor was per-
sistent; better still, he was pa-
o tient. His life had been full of
adventure. From his boyhood
he had been a sailor and a sol-
dier, a fighter and a traveler in
many lands and upon many seas.
He loved the study of geogra-
phy; he was an expert map-
drawer; he had noticed much
and thought more. Believing in
the theory of Pythagoras, famil-
iar to Italian scholars, that this
earth was a globe, he also be-
lieved that by sailing westward
he could at last reach India -
CRI1sTOPHER COLUMBUS. or Cathay, as all the East was
called.
For in those days, four hundred years ago, Eastern Asia was
a new land to Western Europe. It was supposed to be the home
of wealth and luxury. From it came the gold
and spices and all the rare things that Europe
most desired but which were only to be pro-
cured by long and dangerous journeys overland.
To the man who would find a sea-way to India -
great honors and greater riches were sure to "
come. So all adventurous minds were bent upon
discovering a new way to the East. a DREAM OF CATHAY.

THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD.

Christopher Columbus solved the problem. The surest and safest
way to the East, he said, is to sail west. This really sounded so
ridiculous that, as we have seen, men called him crazy and for a
long time would have nothing to do with him or his schemes. But

THE LAURENTIAN ROCKS OF THE ADIRONDACK REGION.

he persisted; he gained friends; he talked so confidently of success,
so eloquently of spreading the knowledge of the Christian religion
among the heathen folk of Asia, so attractively of getting, from
these same heathen folk, their trade, their gold and their spices
that at last the king and queen of Spain were won over to his side,

THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD.

and on the third of August, 1492, with three ships and one hundred
and twenty men, Christopher Columbus set sail from .the port of
Palos in southwestern Spain and steered straight out into what
people called the dreadful Sea of Darkness in search of a new way
to India across the western waters. But. though Columbus was
right in his theories and though, by traveling westward he could
at last reach India and the East something that he knew nothing
of lay in his path to stop his sailing westward. What was it ?
Upon the western half of the earth's surface, stretching its ten
thousand miles of length almost from pole to pole, lay a mighty
continent twin countries, each three thousand miles wide and
joined by a narrow strip of land. Known now to us as North and
South America this western continent contains three tenths of all
the dry land on the surface of the globe. It is nearly fifteen
million square miles in extent, is four times as large as Europe,
five times the size of Australia, one third larger than Africa and
not quite as vast as Asia. And this was what stopped the way as
Columbus sailed westward to the East.
But though it was a new and all unknown land to the great
navigator it is the oldest land in the world. The region from the
Adirondack forests northward to and beyond the St. Lawrence
River, and known as the Laurentian rocks, is said by those students
of the rocks, the geologists, to have been the very first land that
showed itself above the receding waters that once covered the
whole globe. And all along the hills and valleys of North Am-
erica to, the south as far as the Alleghanies and the Ohio the great
ice-sheet that once overspread the earth and that was driven by
the advancing heat nearer and nearer to the North pole, uncovered
a land so early in the history of this western world that it was old
when Europe and Asia were new.
This old, old land, however, is commonly called the New World.
That is because it was new to the Europeans four hundred years
ago. But long before their day there had been people living

THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD.

within what is now the United States. Away back in what is
known' to geologists as the "pleistocene period"-that is the
"most new" or "deposit" age when the ice was slipping north-
ward and dirt was being deposited on the bare rocks; when the
verdure and vegetation that make hillside and valley so beautiful
to-day were just beginning to tinge the earth with green; when
the great hairy elephant bathed in the Hudson and the woolly

rhinoceros wallowed in the prairie lakes; when the dagger-toothed
strous-toed birds waded in the Charles-there appeared, also, by
S

WHEN MIONSTROUS-TOED BIRDS WADED IN TIIIE CIIARLES

rhinoceros wallowed in the prairie lakes; when the dagge'-toothed
tiger prowled through the forests of Pennsylvania and the giant
sloth browsed on the tree tops from Maine to Georgia; when the
curved-tusked mastodon ranged through the Carolinas and mon-
strous-toed birds waded in the Charles--there appeared, also, by
lake-side, river and seashore a naked, low-browed, uncouth race of
savages, chipping the flint stones of the Trenton gravel banks into
knives and spear heads and disputing with the great birds and
beasts whose trails and tracks they crossed for the very caves and
holes in which they lived. These were the first Americans.

THE NE,W WORLD THAT WAS OLD.

The more people mix with each other, you know, the more
friendly they become. In savage lands, to-day, tribes that are
furious fighters against hostile tribes are linked together by some
bond of family ties and held by some sort of internal government.
So it was with the early Americans. As soon as they had risen
above the first brutal desire for eating and sleeping, they learned
the difference between fighting for food and fighting for power;
they saw that the skins of the animals they killed could be wrapped
about them for shelter and that a sharpened stone was a better
weapon than one that was simply flung at their
.. enemy or their game. From fighting with the
S..beasts and with each other they began to band
P'S., together for protection; then, those who lived
in the more favored portions of the land grew
,- a little more mindful of one another's wants;
-- they made of themselves little communities in
which fishing and hunting were the chief pur-
suits, but where those who had the time and
AN EARLY ERICA. inclination began to fashion things of stone or
clay to meet their needs. Bowls and mortars,
knives and arrow-heads were followed in time by bracelets and
bands, vases and pipe-bowls. Still they progressed. The com-
munities became tribes; some of them began to build houses, to
make cloth, to do something more than simply to eat and fight and
sleep.
To-day all over the middle portion of the United States, from
New York to Missouri, there are found great heaps of earth which
wise men who have studied them say are the remains of the towns
and villages, the forts and temples, the homes and trading-places of
the most civilized portion of the American people of two or three
thousand years ago, and known for want of a better name under
the term mound-builders." In the far Western plains and river
courses, in Arizona and New Mexico and along the banks of the

THE RED AMERICANS.

" The men did the hunting, fishing and fighting."

THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD.

mighty Colorado there exist remains of great houses covering large
sections or perched away up in the crevices of mighty cliffs. These
were occupied in the early days by races now called, for con-
venience, the pueblo or house-builders and the cliff-dwellers.
All these home-building people were, however, of the same race
as the fierce and homeless savages who still hunted and slaughtered
in the forests of the East or on the prairies of the West. All were
Americans coming from the same "parent stock." Some of them,
being brighter, more ambitious or more helpful than others, simply
made the most of their opportunities and grew, even, into a rude
kind of civilization.
But while these advanced, the others stood still. Here in the
old American home-land was fought the fight that all the world
has known-the conflict between ignorance and intelligence. The
good and the bad, the workers and the drones, the wise ones and
the wild ones here struggled for the mastery, a certain attempt at
civilization which some had made went down in blood and conquest
and so, gradually, out of the strife came those red-men of America
that our ancestors, the discoverers and colonists from across the
sea, found and fought with four centuries ago.
Hunters require vast tracts of land to support them in anything
approaching comfort; wars and tribal hostilities prevent rapid
growth and there were, probably, never more than five or six
hundred thousand of the red-men of North America living within
the territory now occupied by the United States. They were of all
classes, ranging from the lowest depths of savageness to the higher
forms of barbarism; some were wild and some were wise; some
were brutes and some were statesmen; some were as low in the
social scale as the tramps and roughs of to-day; some as high (from
the red-man's standpoint) as are your own fathers and mothers seen
from your standpoint to-day.
The half-million red-men who owned and occupied our United
States four hundred years ago, though scattered over a vast area,

THE NEW WORLD THAT WAS OLD.

speaking different languages and varying, according to location,
in customs, costume, manners, laws and life, were still brothers,
springing from the same original family and having, in whatever
section of the land they lived, certain things alike; they all had
the same straight, black hair; they all used in their talk the same
sort of many-syllabled words -" bunch words" as they are called;
and they were all what we know as communists -that is, they held
their land, their homes and their prop-
erty in common.
.,1: F A red American's. village was like
S one large family. All its life, all its in-
terests and all its desires being shared
jointly by all its inmates. Just as if
'to-day, the people of Natick, or Catskill,
or Zanesville or Pasadena should agree
,- to live together in one big house with
1 ; little compartments for each family, eat-
,Y ing together from the same soup-kettle
1 and dividing all they raised and all they
': found equally between all the inmates
of the one big house. The men did the
hunting and fishing and fighting; the women attended to the home-
work and the field labor. The boys and girls learned early to do
their share and in the home the woman of the house was supreme.
Even the greatest war-chief when once within his house dared not
disobey the women of his house.
The red-men had but a dim idea of God and heaven. They
were superstitious and full of fancies and imaginings. They wor-
shiped the winds, the thunder and the sun, and were terribly
afraid of whatever they could not understand. They had good
spirits and bad those that helped them in seed time and harvest.
in woodcraft and the chase, and those, also, that baffled and annoyed
them when arrows failed to strike, traps to catch or crops to grow.

COLU.MBUS THE ADMIRAL.

In other words, the red-men of North America were but as little
children who have not yet learned and cannot, therefore, under-
stand the reasons and the causes of the daily happenings that make
up life.

CHAPTER II.

COLUMBUS THE ADMIRAL.

- N a beautiful October morning in the year 1492, as one of
the red Americans belonging to the island tribes that
then lived on what we know as the Bahama group,
-. southeast of the Florida coast, parted the heavy foliage
that ran almost down to the sea on his island home of
Guanahani, he saw a sight that very nearly took his breath away.
Just what it was he could not at first make
out, but he thought either that three terrible
sea-monsters had come up from the water to ;
destroy his land and people or that three great -
canoes with wings had dropped from the sky
bringing, perhaps, to the folks of Guanahani
some marvelous message from the spirits of
the air of whom they stood in so much awe.
Gazing upon the startling vision until he
had recovered from his first surprise he
wheeled about and dashed into his village to
arouse his friends and neighbors. His loud
calls quickly summoned them and out from the
forest and through the hastily parted foliage
they rushed to the water's edge. But as they THE "CANOES WITH WINGS."

COLUMBUS THE ADMIRAL.

gained the low and level beach, they too stood mute with terror
and surprise. For, from each of the monster canoes, other canoes
put off. In them were strange beings clothed in glittering metal
or gaily colored robes. Their faces.were pale in color; their hair
was curly and sunny in hue. And in the foremost canoe grasping
in one hand a long pole from which streamed a gorgeous- banner
and with the. other outstretched as if in greeting stpod a figure
upon whom the Americans looked with wonder, reverence and
awe. It was a tall and commanding figure, noble in aspect and
brilliant in costume and as the islanders marked the marvelous
face and form of this scarlet-clad leader they bent in reverence
and cried aloud Turey turey;
Sjthey are turey /" (Heaven-sent.)
f! On came the canoes filled with a
..,.. ,glittering company and gay with
Ili."_'{ fluttering flags. But as the first
.~ '' boat grounded on the'beach and
i'\ : the tall chief in scarlet, his gray
head yet uncovered, the flaming
4 banner still clasped in his hand,
THE LA--NDING OF C-' leaped into the water followed
by his men the terrified natives
thought the spirits of the air were come to take vengeance upon
them and, turning, they fled to the security of thicket -and tree-
trunk. But led back by curiosity they looked again upon these
strange new-comers, and behold! they were all kneeling, bare-
headed, upon the sand, kissing the earth and lifting their eyes
toward the skies.
Then the scarlet-mantled leader -rising from the ground, planted
the great standard in the sand and drawing a long and shining
sword he spoke loud and solemn words in a language the wonder-
ing islanders could not understand, while those marvelous figures
in glittering metal and gleaming cloth knelt about him as if in

-I A ll,

.. .. .

I~ I' I' 'I11 '$'

THE YOUNG COLUMBUS.
" It was the realization of a life-long dream, first dimly conceived by him in his
boyhood days at Genoa."

- ----p*rrr?-~-rr-~,-r--~- ---l---iT;-i~~-r

COLUMBUS THE ADMIRAL.

worship. They kissed their chieftain's hands, they embraced his
feet and raised such loud and joyous shouts that the simple
islanders'puzzled yet over-awed supposed all they saw to be signs
of the devoutest adoration. Turey; turey!" they cried again.
"He is heaven-sent." And then they, too, prostrated themselves
in adoration.
Who were these pale-faced visitors who had come in such a
startling way across the eastern sea? Not for years could the red
Americans into whose lands they came understand who they were
or why they had visited them, although they learned, all too soon,
that there was little about the new comers that was godlike or
heavenly. The pale-faced strangers deceived and ill-treated the
simple natives from the first and for four hundred years the red-
men of America have known little but bad faith and ill-treatment
at the hands of the white.
But we who have heard the story again and again know who
were these white visitors to Guanahani and from *whence they
came. For the leader of that brilliant throng that knelt in thank-
fulness upon the Bahama sand--this chieftain, whose followers
clustered about him and raised applauding shouts while he took
possession of the new-found land in the name and by the authority
of Ferdinand and Isabella, king and queen of Spain-this scarlet-
mantled captain whom the wondering natives worshiped as a
god, was that Christopher Columbus, the wool-comber's son, the
enthusiast whom men had laughed at as a madman and a crank,"
the patient, persistent Italian adventurer who was now because of
his great discovery owner of one tenth part of all the riches he
should find, Lord Admiral of all the waters into which he should
sail and viceroy of all the lands of this New Spain upon whose
sunny shores he had set foot. I have found Cathay," he cried.
It was a glorious ending to long years of toil and struggle.
It was the realization of a life-long dream, first dimly conceived by
him in his boyhood days at Genoa. With firm and unwavering

COLUMBUS THE ADMIRAL.

faith Columbus had overcome all odds. He had been despised
and ridiculed, threatened and cast aside; he had gone from court
to court in Europe vainly seeking aid for his enterprise; and when,
at last, this was cautiously given, he had braved the terrors of an
unknown sea with three crazy little vessels and an unwilling com-
pany of a hundred and twenty men. For days and days he had
sailed westward seeing nothing, finding nothing, while his men
sneered and grumbled and plainly showed that, if they dared,
they would gladly have flung their captain overboard and turned
about for home. At last signs of land began to appear vagrant
seaweed and floating drift wood, land birds blown off the shore
and warm breezes that almost smelled of field and forest. And
then, one day, at midnight the admiral saw a moving light that
told of life near by and finally in the early morning the cry of
Land! from the watchful lookout, Rodrigo de Triana, a sailor on
board the Nina, told that the end of the long waiting at last had
come and that Cathay was found.
It was on the morning of Friday the twelfth of October, 1492,
that Columbus landed on the island of Guanahani and solemnly
named the island San Salvador." The rich vegetation, the dark-
skinned natives, the rude but glittering ornaments in their ears
and on their arms alike strengthened his belief that his plans were
all successful and that he had found the land of gold and spices he
had sailed away to seek. He had promised to find the Indies and
because by sailing westward he had come upon what he supposed
to be certain' rich islands off the India coast these islands were
called and have ever since been known as the West Indies, while
the red natives who inhabited both the islands and the vast conti-
nent beyond have ever since been called by the name the Spanish
discoverers gave them Indians.
It was all a mistake. Columbus had sailed westward to find
India and had found a new world instead, a world that was to prove
of greater value to mankind than ever India would or could. But

COL UM IB US THE ADMIRAL.

to the day of his death Columbus believed he had found the land
he sought for. "I have gone to the Indies from Spain by travers-
ing the ocean westwardly," were almost his last words. And
although he made four voyages across the Atlantic, each time dis-
covering new lands and seeing new people, he still believed that
he was only touching new and hitherto unknown islands off the
eastern coast of Asia.
And so for a while all the world believed. No conqueror ever
received a more glorious reception on his home-coming than did
Columbus, the admiral. He entered the city of Barcelona, where
the king and queen waited to receive him, in a sort of triumphal
procession. Flags streamed and trumpets blew; great crowds
came out to meet him or lined the ways and shouted their
welcome and enthusiasm as he rode along. Captive Indians,
gaily colored birds, and other trophies from the new-found
land were displayed in the procession and in a richly deco- .
rated pavilion, surrounded by their glittering court, King g :.t
Ferdinand and Isabella the queen received the admiral, bid- --,
ding him sit beside them and tell his wonderful story.
Honors and privileges-were conferred upon him. He was
called Don, he rode at the king's bridle and was served and saluted
as a grandee of Spain.
Columbus, as has been said, made four voyages to America. But
after the second voyage men began to understand that he had
failed to find India. The riches and trade that he promised did not
come to Spain and many an adventurer who had .risked all for the
greed of gold and the return he hoped to make became a beggar
through failure and hated the great admiral through whom he
expected to win mighty riches. Enemies were raised up against
him; he was sent back from his third voyage a prisoner in disgrace
and chains, and from his fourth voyage he came home to die.
But neither failure nor disgrace could take away the glory from
what he had accomplished. Gradually men learned to understand

THE NAMING OF AMERICA.

the greatness of his achievement, the virtue of his marvelous
perseverance, the strength and nobility of his character. After his
death the people of Spain discovered that he had opened for them
the way to riches and honor; by the wealth of "the Indies" that
Columbus brought to their feet their struggling land was made one
of the most powerful nations of the earth; and though some people
have said that Columbus did not discover America, but that French
fishermen or Norwegian pirates were the real discoverers, we all
know that, until Columbus sailed across the sea, America was un-
known to Europe and that, for all practical purposes, his faith and
his alone gave to the restless people of Europe a new world.
America was better than Cathay, for it has proved the home of
freedom, hope and progress.

CHAPTER III.

THE NAMING OF AMERICA.

OLUMBUS, as you have heard, did not know that he had
discovered a new world. He thought he had merely
S touched some of the great islands off the eastern coast of
S4- Asia. Even when, in the month of August, 1498, he first
saw the mainland of America, at the mouth of the river
Orinoco, he did not imagine that he had found a new continent, but
believed that he had discovered that fabled river of the East into
which, so men said, flowed the four great rivers of the world the
Ganges, the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile.

THE NAMING OF AMERICA.

But his success set other men to thinking, and after his wonder-
ful voyage in 1492 many expeditions were sent westward for pur-
poses of discovery and exploration. After he had found Cathay"
every man, he declared, wanted to become a
discoverer. There is an old saying you may
have heard that tells us ."nothing succeeds
like success." And the success of Columbus ,
sent many adventurers sailing westward.
They, too, wished to share in the great
riches that were to be found in "the lands
where the spices grow," and they believed
they could do this quite as well as the great
admiral. Once at a dinner given to Columbus a certain envious
Spaniard declared that he was tired of hearing the admiral praised
so highly for what any one else could have done. "Why," said
he, "if the admiral had not discovered the Indies, do you think
there are not other men in Spain who might have done this?"
Columbus made no reply to the jealous Don, but took an egg from
its dish. "Can any of you stand this egg on end?" he asked.
One after another of the company tried it and failed, whereupon
the admiral struck it smartly on the table and stood it upright on
its broken part. "Any of you can do it now," he said, "and any
of you can find the Indies, now that I have shown you
--, the way."
S, So every great king in Europe desired to possess new
principalities beyond the sea. Spain, Portugal, France,
England alike sent out voyages of discovery westward -
trying to set the egg on end."
"*' Of all these discoverers two other Italians, following
where Columbus had led, are worthy of special note-
John Cabot, sent out by King Henry the Seventh of England in
1497, and Amerigo or Alberigo Vespucci, who is said to have sailed
westward with a Spanish expedition in the same year. Both of

THE NAMING OP AMERICA.

these men, it is asserted, saw the mainland of America before
Columbus did, and England founded her claims to possession in
North America and fought many bloody wars to maintain them
because John Cabot in 1497 "first made the American continent"
and set up the flag of England on a Canadian headland. In that
same year of 1497 Cabot sailed along the North American coast
from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson; and Vespucci, although this
is doubted by many, sailed in the same year along the southern
coast from Florida to North Caro-
lina.. In 1499 Vespucci really did
touch the South American coast,
and in 1503 he built the first fort
on the mainland near the present
'' city of Rio de Janeiro.
-Both these Italian navigators
thought at first, as did Columbus,
S '-that they had found the direct
way to the Indies, and each one
earnestly declared himself to have
been the first to discover the main-
Sland. At any rate Vespucci could
talk and write the best and he had
many friends among the scholars
AMERIGO VESPUCCI. of his day. When 1 therefore, it
really dawned upon men that the
land across the seas to which the genius of Columbus had led them
was not India or Cathay" but a new continent, then it was that
the man who had the most to say about it obtained the greatest
glory- that of giving it a name.
Wise men who have studied the matter deeply are greatly puz-
zled just how to decide whether the continent of America took its
name from Amerigo Vespucci or whether Vespucci took his name
from America. Those who hold to the first quote from a very old

SPAIN AND HER RIVALS. 29

h ,ok that says "a fourth part of the world, since Amerigo found it,
w'-we m:1 call Amerige or America;" those who incline to the other
oEpilnion claim that the name America came from an old Indian
wNrI Maraca-pan or Amarca, a South American country and tribe;
\espueci, they say, used this native word to designate the new
la i. and upon its adoption by map-makers deliberately changed
hii former name of Alberigo or Albericus Vespucci to Amerigo or

But whichever of these two opinions is correct, the Italian astron-
omer ;iid ship chandler Vespucci received the honor and glory that
SColu.ius should have .received or that Cabot might justly have
c
j fourr ihndred years borne the name that he or his admirers gave to
it America.

CHAPTER IV.

SPAIN AND HER RIVALS.

'*''i FTER the year 1500 ships and explorers followed each
[iiy/ other westward in rapid succession. Spain, as she had
'lii.started the enterprise, still held the lead and secured most
of the glory and the reward. France sought a footing on
the northern shores, England awoke slowly to the value
of tle Western world, but for nearly fifty years Spain stood alone
in t IP field of American discovery and conquest.
Ainl Spain's hand was heavy. The nation was greedy for gold;
Almieri.c;L was thought to be a land of gold and every exertion was

SPAIN AND HER RIVALS.

made to obtain great stores of the precious metal. For this the
ships sailed westward while the "gentlemen-adventurers" thronged
their decks; for this they coasted up and down the land, killing the
trusting natives without pity, or turning
them into slaves to help on their greedy
S-%"- search. The first question on landing was:
Which way does the treasure lie? and the
/ :. new comers could scarcely wait but would
rush where even the slenderest promise
'' pointed with the cry, "Gold, gold!" upon
their lips.
But this restless hunt for gold gave the
knowledge of new lands to the world. In,1500, Captain Cabral
the Portuguese navigator discovered the shores of Brazil; that
same year, thousands of miles to the north, the French sailor.
Gaspar Cortereal landed upon Labrador; in 1508 Vincent Pinzon
entered the Rio de La Plata and the Spanish gold-hunters find-
ing the Indians not hardy enough for work in the mines sent over
African negroes to take their places, and thus introduced into
America the curse of negro slavery; in 1511 Diego
Velasquez, with three hundred men, conquered the V
island of Cuba; in 1512 John Ponce de Leon, seek-
ing for a magic fountain that, it was said, would
make him young again, discovered Florida but not
the magic spring; in 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa, "i. -1'
still looking for the coveted gold, crossed the Isth-
mus of Darien and discovered the Pacific Ocean; in ""
1519 Hernando Cortes with five hundred and fifty
men sailed to the conquest of Mexico and completed
his bloody work in less than two years; in 1519
Francisco de Garay explored the Gulf of Mexico; in 1520 Lucas de
Ayllon explored the Carolina coast; in 1522 Fernandq Magellan
sailed around the world; in 1524 the Italian captain Verrazano

raw I.'

CORONADO'S MARCH.

"He set out from Mexico to find a wonderful land of gold known as the Seven Cities of Cibola.'"

~---- -7--~-

~,
..
r,

1

SPAIN AND IIER RIVALS.

s-liled with a French expedition into Narragansett Bay and New
York harbor: in 1531 the cruel Pizarro with scarce.a thousand men
overthrew the IIl': civilization of Peru and conquered all that coast
l or Sl:ainr ; in 15. : .) lcques Cartier, a French navigator, explored the
Gulf of St. Lawreiice and set up the arms of France on the banks
ot thle great rivei of that name; in 1535 the Spanish captain
Meniioz;i with t\o thousand men conquered all the great silver
country about the Rio de la Plata; in 1537 Cort6s, sending an
expedition northi- ward along the Pacific coast, dis-
-cor'.-:,d tlh re uin called California; in 1539 Fernando
I)D Soto with a gallant army, landed in Florida for
tive cinqui.U -t of all that country, and marched
-. westward to his death ; in 1541
.. Chile was conquered by Spanish
:, troops and Orellana the advent-
S..~~ urer made the descent of the
S"'"'--"'.' Amazon from its source to its
mouth; in 1543 De Soto's broken
.:, ex petition came sadly back, a sorry
eionaint only, leaving its leader dead
'" nii,.o, li the waters of the great river he
"S I h;,I li-' i,\jred the mighty Mississippi.
It i- :I lung and adventurous record, in which
S a in I Ile:i I; almost all the glory, is it not ? But
so for fifty years did Spanish ships and Spanish
IN SIGHT OF MEXICO. soldiers the Conquistadores or conquerors, as
they were called, sail and march hither and
thither, exploring and conquering, making a few settlements at im-
portant points from which they might send home the riches they
had collected, getting themselves hated by the red men whom
they tortured and enslaved, and growing each year more and more
greedy for the gold they never seemed able to get enough of.
Whoever is greedy is certain to be disliked, for he who tries to

SPAIN AND HER RIVALS.

appropriate everything generally finds that other people object to
such an appropriation. Four hundred years ago the Pope of Rome
was believed to be the head of the Christian world. To him kings
and princes gave obedience and his word was law. When Portugal
-by reason of her discoveries in Africa and Asia -and Spain, be-
cause of what Columbus had found across the western seas, appealed
to Rome for authority to possess the lands, the Pope drew a line on
the map and said: "All discoveries west of this line shall belong to
Spain; all east of it shall belong to
Portugal."
S But there were other nations that
-" | objected to such a division. England,
as we have seen, claimed the right to
possess America because of Cabot's dis-
cover in 1497, and France whose
fishermen had for years sailed westward
S. to the shallow places or "banks" off
S Newfoundland where codfish were to be
N i caught, laid equal claim to the Ameri-
can shores. For years they did not
___ openly dispute with Spain, for the ships
and explorers of that nation kept to
the south in their search for gold, while France kept to the north.
Verrazano, in May, 1524, had landed near Portsmouth, N. H., and
in 1537 Captain Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River
as far as Montreal. Other French ships followed, and though Spain
grumbled loudly and threatened all sorts of harsh things to France
for thus sailing into her territories," for a while nothing' was
done because Spain still held that the most valuable part of America
was to the south where the gold mines lay.
But now England awoke to the fact that Spain's greediness must
be stopped, and that some of the good things that were being found
in America ought really to come to her. The king of England

SPALIN AND HER RIVALS.

quarrelled with the Pope of Rome, and denying the right of the
Pope to give away the new world to Spain, King Henry the Eighth
and his daughter the famous Queen Elizabeth began to send their
ships and fighting-men into the very regions that Spain had held
so long-the West Indies and South American waters. Captain
William Hawkins, his son, Captain John Hawkins, and the brave
Sir Francis Drake were the most celebrated of these early English
sea-captains who dared the might of Spain. They worried the
Spaniards terribly; they stormed their forts, captured their ships
and seized their stores of goods and merchandise, and by their
daring and their audacity so enraged the Spaniards, that for over a
hundred years the waters all about the West India Islands and the
lands which were known as the Spanish Main, were the scene of
bloody battles and cruel revenges. These old English-
men were brave men though they were cruel fighters,
as indeed were all men in those bloody times. Captain
John Hawkins kept his ships together by these excel-
lent directions: "Serve God daily; love one another;
preserve your victuals; beware of fire; and keep good
company." And Sir Francis Drake, who was the first
of Englishmen to discover the Pacific Ocean, and who in
1578 made a famous voyage around the world, was so
feared by the Spaniards against whom he fought con-
tinually, that they called him "the English dragon."
Other noted Englishmen who made themselves famous in Ameri-
can discovery were Martin Frobisher who tried to find a way around
America by sailing to the north; Sir Humphrey Gilbert who twice
tried to make a settlement in North America and the story of
whose shipwreck in the Swallow has been told in a beautiful poem
by-Longfellow; Captain John Davis, whom you know in geography
as the brave mariner for whom Davis' Straits were named; and Sir
Walter Raleigh who gave the knowledge of tobacco to the world
and made the first English settlement in North America in 1587.

SPAIN AND HER RIVALS.

But, before Raleigh, settlements had already been made in what
is now the region known as the United States. John Ribault and
Rene de Laudonniere, French Protestants both, in the years 1562
and 15n.4 settled French colonies in Florida only to be horribly
killed by the Spaniards who claimed the sole right of occupation of
that beautiful summer land. In 1565 the Spaniards founded St.
Augustine and in 1570 tried
to make a settlement on the
Potomac River, but failed. *The
Spaniards even penetrated into
the country as far north as Cen-
tral New York, but all their
colonies north of Florida were
failures. In 1540 a Spanish
captain named Coronado, set
out from Mexico to find a won-
derful land of gold known as
the Seven Cities of Cibola."
He led a most remarkable march
across the western territory of
the, United States almost as far
north as the present city of
Omaha. But he failed to find
the seven fairy cities he sought
sIR WALTER RAbEIGH. or even the gold he hoped to
bring away; though, had he but
known it, his march across New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado was
over more gold than he ever dreamed of but it was sunk deep
down in mines beneath the earth.
So, all through the sixteenth century, from 1500 to 1600, went on
the fight between Spain and .France and England for the possession
of the western world. Except in the far south, in Mexico and the
West Indies, in Brazil and Peru, few settlements were made. It

HOlMES IN THE N EW WOBLD.

was simply a gold-hunt for a hundred years. At length Europeans
began to understand that the riches of the New World were in its
splendid climate and its fertile soil, and learned to know that future
success was to be found only by those who made homes within its
borders. Then it was that the gold-hunt ceased and the explorers
were followed by the colonizers.

CHAPTER V.
-ip :T "
,. _-- :- ,-L I

CHAPTER V.

HOMES IN' THE NEW WORLD.

SHAVE seen boys and girls have not you ? who, when
- "'| all had equal chances, would rush to the best strawberry-
SpJpatch, or the fullest blackberry-bush, or the best place for
Ji'. a sight of some passing procession and cry out, Ah-ha
S..it's mine.. I got here first! Such a display of selfishness
is certain to make their companions angry, especially if the finders
refuse to share their good fortune.
.Well--there was a certain wise old poet (Dryden, his name was)
who after studying the ways of the world declared that

" Men are but children of a larger growth,"

HOMES IN THE NEW WORLD.

and the settlement of America is good proof of this. For each nation
as it found a footing in the new world cried out to the rest of Europe,
just like selfish children: It's mine. I got here first! "
And it does seem as though for fully a hundred and fifty years -
from 1600 to 1750--the European settlers in North America spent
a good portion of their time in
trying to push one another off
the little spots of earth on which
they stood, shoving and elbowing
each other and growling out:
: -.. "Get off; this is my ground!"
t or: "Get off, yourself; I've as
much right here as you! "
:;1 The Spaniards pushed away the
S French and the English elbowed
-- off the Dutch and the Dutch
.... .', crowded oilt the Swedes until at
last, with a grand shove, the
English pushed off Spaniards,
..'-..". 'Dutchmen, Frenchmen and all,
S, .' ." occupying the whole of North
...' America from the St. Lawrence
,. i r River to the Gulf of Mexico.
At first the colonies that set-
S tled in America were started for
LBmoney-making purposes. Those
"ELBOWING OFF."
who founded them came for pur-
poses of trade or because they hoped to make a living in the new
world more easily than they could at home. Strange stories were
told of the riches that were to be found in America. "Gold," so
one man said it had been told him, "is more plentiful there than
copper. The pots and pans of the folks there are pure gold, and as
for rubies and diamonds they go forth on holidays and pick them

HOMES IN THE NEW WORLD.

up on the seashore to hang on their children's coats and stick in
their children's caps."
So the lazy people who wished to get rich at once without hard

knowledge
who never

work, sailed over to America only to be terribly
disappointed. But with all these money-seeking
adventurers went also many hard-working and
many good and kind people who really desired
S homes in the new world or hoped to be able to
help the "red salvages," as they called the In-
dians. Brave preachers or missionaries of the
Roman Catholic Church went ahead even of the
French explorers and settlers; they carried the
of the Christian religion to the wild Indians of Canada,
could seem to understand what the good missionaries

sought to teach them and, too often, thinking that because the
"black robes" came from hostile tribes they must be enemies, tor-
tured and killed them. To the English colonies, also, came men
and women who had' a deeper purpose than simply to make a living.
They came- because they found it so hard to agree upon religious
matters with those in authority at home, and because they hoped
in a new land to be able to live together in peace and with the
right to worship God as they pleased.
All this. was in the early years of 1600. There had been settle-
ments formed already within the limits of what is now the
United States, but they were not permanent.
In 1565 the Spaniards had founded the present city of St.
Augustine in Florida, making it thus the oldest town in the
United States, but this place while in Spanish possession had
no association with any of the other North American settle- JAmS 1.
ments and can scarcely be considered as belonging to them.
In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh had attempted to plant an English
settlement on Roanoke Island on the North Carolina coast, but the
houses and colonists he left there had disappeared forever when

Captain John Smith. His life is one exciting story. A rover and
a fighter from his boyhood, he had been in many lands and had
had many surprising adventures.
His life in Virginia was no less
remarkable. When provisions
failed and disaster and death
threatened the colonists, Smith
by his wise and energetic meas-
ures found them relief although S 1I.,
many of them were so jealous
of his superior ability, that they
sought to drive him away. But, .
notwithstanding their envy, he
worked with hand and brain to
make the settlement at James-
town a success. He made friends
with the Indians; he procured
from them food for the succor
of his starving comrades, and, at
the risk of his own life, again
and again carried the struggling
colony through the dark days of
its beginnings. But he did brag C are dseznesrta-Jew ta;ce t
terribly. 'hUt, tfy Grace and lory, ernr b,
-v, atr"e-:Djfilucr/es; azn .oWl.- OverrAthrow
The Indians of Virginia were Of Salay.eimr t Cviltz d ly t./~c
at first friendly to the settlers. AfJlrewt jy ,.j.rS;an:d is slory cWy'
r ouz artrale wihOgat.luEG wId in.
But they soon learned to dis- o -
trust and dislike them, and but ,ffird-.~ojfitthkse t9Y ar
s".E f rr\i. *w BtavHtk larate sereel oanarra
for the watchfulness of Captain
John Smith and the good-will of 'i f ..s -
a little Indian girl whose name
was Ma-ta-oka, sometimes called Pocahontas, the settlement at
Jamestown would soon have been utterly destroyed. Pocahontas,

HOMES IN THE NEW WORLD.

who was the daughter of the Indian chief Powhatan, proved her-
self in many ways the friend of the white people, and it is sad to
think that after her friend Captain Smith had left the colony, the
settlers repaid her kindness by trying to kidnap the Indian girl so
as to force food and corn from
her father. Powhatan the chief
", -I .was very angry, and threatened
V.- to destroy the colony, 'but just
then a certain English gentleman
:- whose name was Rolfe, fell in
-' : love with Pocahontas and mar-
';. ried her, and, at her request,
Powhatan made a lasting peace
-l :. ..-, I with the white men. It is said
I' :that two presidents of the United
S.-.. -States, William Henry Harrison
_" :". and his grandson Benjamin Har-
S .i rison, are descended from this
Indian girl who married the
Englishman.
-Captain John Smith was so
.deeply interested in America that
he wrote and talked about it a
j o _e/ .4 great deal. He made a map of
~-n d c6- 7 '-mryi what he called New England, and
the young English prince Charles
(afterwards the king who lost his head) dotted it all over with make-
believe towns to which he gave the names of well-known towns in
England. Captain Smith told another English captain whose name
was Henry Hudson, some of his ideas, and in 1609 Captain Hudson,
sailing in the service of Holland, remembered some of Captain
Smith's words and hunted up and explored the beautiful river that
now bears his name Hudson River. At the mouth of this river

HOMES IN THE NEW WORLD.

in 1614 the Dutch, as the people of Holland are called, made a
settlement which they named New Amsterdam. The colonists
were sent out by a rich corporation in Holland called the
Dutch West India Company, formed like the London and
Plymouth Companies for the purpose of trade. They were
Sent to the Hudson River country to purchase furs from
the Indians. This little fur post was the beginning of the
great city of New York.
PRINCE CHLs. Captain Smith's favorable report of the New England
coast and that of .other explorers
who had sailed from Maine to Long Island
Sound, turned the attention of settlers in
that direction, but the first real settlement
-was made in 1620 by a body of English '
exiles known to us as "the Pilgrims."
Driven first to Holland by religious perse-
cution, they sailed from Delft Haven in
the Mayflower under arrangements with
the London or Virginia Company; as it was
sometimes called, intending to settle some-
where near the Hudson River. By some
mistake they did not reach Virginia but
striking to the northward, landed first at
Cape Cod and, afterward on the twenty-
second of December in the year 1620,
stepped ashore on the gray bowlder fa-
mous as Plymouth Rock, on the Massa-
chusetts coast, and there, in the bleak
winter of 1620-21, founded a sorry little
settlement that was the beginning of New WILLIAM PENN THE YOUNGER.
England.
Within the next fifty years other settlements were made along
the Atlantic coast by emigrants from Europe most of them from

HOMiES IN THE NEW WORLD.

England -who desired to build for themselves homes in the New
World. In 1623 Captain John Mason made two settlements on the
Piscataqua River in New Hampshire one at Dover and one at
Portsmouth. In 1634 certain English Roman Catholics. seeking
relief from persecution, settled on the Potomac River in Maryland.
In 1635 people from the Plymouth Colony settled at the mouth of
the Connecticut River, and in 1636 Roger Williams, a good but out-
spoken man who could not agree on matters of religion with his
Massachusetts brethren, was driven from the colony and with some
of his followers founded Providence in Rhode Island. In 1638 a
company of emigrants from Sweden settled on the shores of Dela-
ware Bay; in 1640 certain Virginia colonists who could not agree
on religious matters with their neighbors, set up for themselves at
Albemarle in North Carolina; in 1670 William Sayle brought -a
company of English settlers across the sea and founded Charleston
in South Carolina; in 1664 a settlement was made at a place called
Elizabeth in New Jersey; in 1682 William Penn the younger, a
famous English Quaker, with one hundred of his associates settled
in Pennsylvania where now stands the great city of Philadelphia;
and, years after, in 1730, the English soldier General Oglethorpe
with one hundred and twenty colonists, settled in Georgia on the
site of the present city of Savannah.
These thirteen settlements along the Atlantic coast were the be-
ginnings of the United States of America. As you see they were
for the most part made by people who were not satisfied because
things at home did not suit them; and they were, in most cases,
backed by the capital of rich men who saw in the new land an
opportunity to make money and, at the same time, help the poor
or the persecuted folks who were anxious to escape from their
home troubles.
They occupied but a narrow strip on the ragged sea-border of a
vast and unexplored continent; their beginnings were full of dis-
appointment and disaster; their future was uncertain and yet these

THE FIRST COLONISTS.

thirteen struggling settlements were in time to be reckoned by
England as among the most important and at the same time the
most troublesome of all her possessions in foreign lands.

CHAPTER VI.

THE. FIRST COLONISTS.

W HEN we remember how many kinds of people go off to set-
W tle in new countries and the reasons that draw them there,
we shall not be at all surprised to learn that the settlers
X along the Atlantic border of North America two hundred
S and fifty years ago, did not have the easiest sort of life or
the pleasantest of times as they tried to make homes for themselves
in the midst of all that wilderness. Even though we try to do so,
we can scarcely picture to ourselves the three thousand miles of
coast line from Maine to Georgia as it looked in those early dny.4.
For, try as we may, we shall not be able to think of it other than as
it exists to-day cleared of its woodland, studded with
noble cities and alive with a crowding and busy throng of
men and women, boys and girls. Then, in all New Eng- i
land, the forests ran down to the sea; behind the white
sands of the New Jersey and Carolina beaches, the land '
was dark with monstrous pines, while over all the land
prowled the wolf and the bear, the .buffalo and the elk,
and all manner of wild wood beasts that we can now only
find in menageries, if at all. Not a horse or a cow lived
in all North America; those now here are descendants of
the stock brought over by the European settlers.

48 THE FIRST COLONISTS.

Here and -there, throughout the land, were scattered Indian vil-
lages in which lived a people that no white man dared to trust, be-
cause no white man could understand their manner of thought and
life, while roving bands in the hunting and fishing season came into
the settlements to exchange their peltry for the wonderful labor-
saving tools the white man had brought with him, or to pry about
and make husband and housewife suspicious and uncomfortable.
All about the little settlements rose the uncleared forests in whose
depths and shadows lurked they knew not what dangers. The
woodman's axe had made but small openings as yet, and near at
hand stood wooden block-house, clumsy fort or picketed palisades as
the sole protection against lurking Indians or the still more savage
foemen of France or Spain.
Neither store nor shop, wareroom nor manufactory were to be

I I ', II1 I '...

I ''I '1 ',

1" I I

A PALISADED FORT.

found when food ran short or household stuffs were needed, and all
who lacked must go without or starve until such time -as the supply
ship, braving storm and wreck, came sailing over-sea.
But, more than. all this, the greatest danger to the struggling
settlements lay in the colonists themselves. Here were people of

THE FIRST COLONISTS.

all sorts and conditions the poor and the proud, the sick and the
well, the good and the bad, the weak and the strong, the wise and
the foolish, the worker and the drone, the dissatisfied and the indif-
ferent, the over-particular and the careless, every class and every
kind of men, women and children whom poverty, discontent, poli-
tics, 'persecution, restlessness,
greed, love and ambition had sent
across the sea to struggle in a new
world for the homes or the ad-
vantages they had lost in the land ."t.
of their birth. Quarreling and
jealousies over rights and privi- '. -
leges; privation and distress from "
lack of sufficient food or proper 4 : ''
home surroundings; disease, sick- r
ness and death -all these sprung i.1'",- 1 "
up in or visited each little settle- I
ment, cutting down its numbers, r i
stirring up discontent and strife
or hindering its growth when *
most it needed gentle influences, | '
sturdy worked's and healthy and
honest lives.
And yet in spite of all draw- susPICIous oF INDIANS.
backs the settlement slowly grew.
Along that narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea,
from Maine to Georgia, were planted in the years between 1620
and 1700 the seeds from which has sprung a mighty nation of free-
men. Before 1620, twelve hundred and sixty-one persons had been
sent to the various "plantations" of the Virginia Company; by
1634 the Massachusetts colonists had grown to between three and
four thousand in number, distributed in sixteen towns. There were
frequent disputes at first as to the ownership of the land and just

THE FIRST COLONISTS.

what the different companies or proprietors had the ability to
promise or the right to give away, but these gradually grew less,-
until at length the only bar to the complete English possession of
the Atlantic coast from Pemaquid to Charleston, was the little
Dutch settlement at the. mouth of the Hudson River.
Three hundred years ago there were two questions that more
than any other perplexed people. These were: where and how to
live and where and how to go to church.
The Old World was so full of struggle be-
tween kings and princes, lords and ladies,
as to just who had the strongest arm and
just who should be the ruler, that the peo-
ple who were not of high rank were
looked upon as fit only to fight for this
side or for that. Their trade or occupa-
tion was interfered with and following
this or that party might make a man a
pauper in a day or cost him his life on the
battle-field or his head on the scaffold.
SWhen, therefore, the settlement. of a- new
land far away from all this strife and risk,
offered opportunity for whosoever had
pluck enough or ambition enough to try
DU.rc WINDALLLS N OLD XNW YOfK. for fortune in fresh fields, those who loved
money, those who loved ease, those who
loved freedom and those who loved life, hastened to make the
most of the opportunity and sailed to the Virginia Plantations, or
the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam at the mouth of the Hud-
son. Trade in tobacco and trade in furs speedily made both these
sections centers of business, and the Virginia planters and the New
Netherland factors built up a steadily growing trade with the
home markets in England and Holland.
The question as to where and how to go to church was equally

SETTLERS FROM HOLLAND APPROACHING NEW AMSTERDAM.

v .

THE FIRST COLONISTS.

important. When Martin Luther in Germany and King Henry the
Eighth in England broke away from -the Roman Catholic Church,
men began to think for themselves more and more, and new sects
and new opinions sprung up in the churches. This led to what is
called freedom of thought, but it led also to discussions, quarreling,
persecution and death. People who held certain religious opinions

CAVALIER AND PURITAN.
CAVALIER AND PURITAN.

were very firm in their new faith; the people who believed other-
wise were equally firm, and so it came to pass that they could not
live together in peace and charity. Upon this those who were of
the weaker or persecuted party looked abroad for some place where
they could live as they chose, going to the church of their choice
and mingling with those who believed as they did. These too

THE FIRST COLONISTS.

hailed America as the place they sought, and thus was Massachu-
setts settled by the Pilgrims and the Puritans, Maryland by the
Roman Catholics, Virginia by the Episcopalians and Pennsylvania
by the Quakers.
But even in the new land all was not peace. For the colonists
had not brought across the sea that brotherly kindness that is
called the spirit of toleration. That was to be gained only as the
outgrowth of American life and American freedom. So, from
Maine to Georgia the different church sects were jealous of one
another; they argued and quarreled, refused to live together in
unity and showed the self-same spirit of intolerance and the same
inclination toward persecution that they had fled from in England,
France or Holland.
But in spite of religious differences and political jealousies, of
opposition to trade and neglect by those at home who had promised
them support and succor, the thirteen colonies on the Atlantic bor-
der slowly extended their clearings and enlarged their numbers.
The date of the first permanent settlements along the seaboard
- not counting the Spanish at St. Augustine were the French at
Port Royal in Nova Scotia in 1605, the English at Jamestown in
Virginia in 1607, the French at Quebec in Canada in 1608, the
Dutch at New Amsterdam (afterward New York) in 1613 and the
English at Plymouth in Massachusetts in 1620.
The French settlement of Canada does not properly fall within
our plan of this story any more than does the Spanish settlement of
Mexico, for neither Canada nor Mexico have yet become parts of
the United States, but the enterprise and energy with which the,
priests and soldiers, the lords and ladies, the traders and peasants of
France sought to found a vast colony among the lakes, the rivers
and the forests of the North, are worthy of remembrance. Here
Cartier had made discoveries; here Champlain, bravest and most un-
tiring of Frenchmen, rightly named the Father of New France,"
had founded and fought; here Marquette the missionary and La

THE FIRST COLONISTS.

Salle the trader lived and labored, and, becoming pioneers, pushed
westward, discovering the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers and, by
right of this discovery, establishing the claim of France to all the
wide western country beyond the Alleghanies. But all this vast
section, as we shall see, from Canada to Louisiana, was finally
secured from France by the power of England or the wisdom of
the United States.
The beginnings of home-life in the New World which we have
already noticed as the "first permanent settlements," soon led to
other attempts at colonization. The founding
of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 was followed
by that of Henrico and Bermuda in 1611 and
,of other "plantation" settlements in 1616. In
New England the struggling Plymouth colony
of 1620 was followed by the settlements at
Little Harbor (or Portsmouth) in New Hamp- I,
shire in 1623, at Pemaquid near the mouth of ,. I.
the Kennebec River in Maine in 1625, at Salem
in Massachusetts in 1628, at Boston in 1630,
at Providence in Rhode Island in 1636, and at I
Hartford and New Haven in Connecticut in
1635 and 1638. The Dutch settlements at
New Amsterdam (New York) and at Renselaerswyck (Albany) in
1623 and at the Wallabout (Brooklyn) were the principal centers
of Dutch life, while at Philadelphia in 1682, at Port Royal and
Charleston in South Carolina in 1670 and 1680 the Europeans broke
ground for homes in a new and untried land. From these as cen-
ters other towns were started and in 1700 the population of the
Atlantic coast settlements extending from Pemaquid in Maine to
Port Royal in South Carolina had reached upwards of two hundred
thousand. During all these early years the colonists had but little
in common; their life and labor were largely confined to the places
in which they had come to make their homes, and a journey from

IHOW THEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS.

New York to Boston was almost as uncommon as is to-day a trip to
Central Africa or a voyage to the Friendly Isles.
Their forms of government, too, for these first years were differ-
ent. One by one, however, the colonies were taken out of the
hands of the Companies and Lord Proprietors by whom they had
originally been planted and were made royal provinces of England;
and, in 1700, the word of the King of England was law throughout
all the thirteen colonies of the English Crown.

CHAPTER VII.

HOW THEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS.

HERE are few boys and girls to-day, however tenderly
S | brought up, who do not enjoy getting away from their
Comfortable homes for a few days in the summer and
-1 i1 "roughing it" in some. out-of-the-way "camp by river,
-. lake or sea. But, after a while, this summer roughing"
grows disagreeable and the longing comes for the nice things and
modern conveniences of home.
Life in the thirteen colonies in America two hundred and
fifty years ago was the hardest kind of "roughing it." Con-
veniences there were none, and even necessities were few. Many
of the new settlers could not stand the life. Some returned across
the sea to the homes they had left; some, unable to endure the
privations they had to undergo, sickened and died in. their new
homes; but those who did survive or who could stand the home-
sickness, the dangers and the diseases which all' alike must face and

HOW THEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS. 57

share, toughened under hardship, grew strong and sturdy and self-
reliant, and became the ancestors of that hardy race which has built
up into prosperity these United States of ours.
As you have learned from the previous chapter,the early colonists,
alone and in a strange land, had to depend upon themselves for
almost every thing they needed to support life or give them the few

LONGING 15OR THE OLD HOME.

necessities and fewer comforts they must have. The ground had to
be cleared of its forests, broken and ploughed and prepared for grain
and grass, for vegetables and fruits. Many a time did those first
comers suffer for food. The "starving time of 1610 in Virginia,
and the famine of 1623 in the Plymouth colony, were hardships that
6.1

LONGING FOR THI" OLD" ..

be cleared of its forests,,broken and ploughed and prepared for grin

HOW THEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS.

very nearly destroyed the feeble settlements; often the people of
Plymouth in those first days had nothing but clams to eat and water
to drink. And yet one of their faithful ministers, Elder Brewster,
could in the midst of such a terrible lack of food thank God that
"they were permitted to suck of the abundance of the seas and of
the treasures hid in the sand." Was not that an heroic patience ?
The first houses were the roughest of shelters holes dug in the
ground and hastily roofed over; then, flimsy bark huts or rudely-
made log cabins; houses of hewed logs or of planks, hand-split or
hand-sawed from selected forest logs. Finally, as wealthier people
came to the settlements more substantial houses of wood or stone
were built. Sometimes, the finishing touches," the doors and win-
dows, even the very bricks themselves of which the gable
end- of thie houi.es were built, were brought across the sea
p R from England or Holland
for the adornment of these
' :. more pretentious houses.
,- l- '- '. T-2 Certain. of these old land-
Smarks may now and then
'be found to-day, standing,
AN OLD LANDMAK. still strong, though gray and
weather-beaten. I recall one
such in which I have spent many a happy hour, a mile or so back
from the Hudson River, just across the New Jersey line -its ends.
built of little Dutch bricks brought across from Holland, its quaint
and startling mantel of pictured tiles descriptive of Old Testament
history, its floor of still solid hand-hewed planks, its massive rafters
dark with smoke and age, and over the Dutch half-door the date of
building set in burned brick in the front of field stone. And in the
old Jackson house at Andover, in Massachusetts, the chimney was so
huge that two or three mischievous fellows, fastening a rope about
one of their number, lowered him down the chimney until he
reached the spot where hung a fine fat turkey set aside for the

~~------ -5 -

iJ 'za :

GOING TO SCHOOL IN 1700.

~i~ -

HOW THEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS.

wedding dinner of Master Jackson's daughter." Then thief and
booty were alike pulled up the chimney, and of-the wedding turkey
a stolen feast was made.
Within the house the rooms were few, but the kitchen, with its
huge fireplace, supplied with seats and settles, was at once kitchen,
dining and living room; it was the center of the home life; its
rough but strong home-made furniture, its wooden table-dishes and
clumsy kitchen-things would be deemed by us of to-day as suited
only to the hardest kind of "roughing it." There were, of course,
finer houses built as the years went by and the people prospered,
but even the finest mansions had but few of what we now call con-
veniences-few indeed of what we hold as necessities-and even the
most highly-favored children of those early days endured privations
that the boys and girls of our day would grumble at as unbearable.
Porridge for, breakfast, mush or hasty pudding for supper, with a
dinner of vegetables and but little meat at any time were the daily
meals of our ancestors. Life in all the colonies was rough and
simple, and though we of to-day who expect so much would find in
it much to complain of, it does not seem to have been altogether
uncomfortable as the settlements grew and the fields became more
productive, the crops more plentiful and the larder more bountifully
supplied. Except in the cities such as Boston, New York and
Philadelphia, where English manners and English fashions gradually
crept into the wealthier families the wardrobes of parents and
children were scanty and plain. They were usually of homespun
stuff, for the whirring spinning-wheel was the best-used belonging
of every household. Leather breeches and homespun jackets were
worn by father and son, but on Sunday or at times of festivity and
holiday, there was a display of lace ruffles and silver buckles and a
certain amount of style and finery. The windmills ground the corn
that the fertile farms produced; the post-rider galloped from town
to town with news or messages; the roads were poor; the streets in
the few towns were poorly paved and illy lighted; the field work

HOW THEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS.

was the great thing to be done, and strict attendance at church on
Sunday with two-hour sermons to occupy the time was the main
privilege of young and old. Schools were
rare and never long-continuing. In the
S ^ South little was done. toward the general
/education of the children, and many of the
boys and girls in the early days grew to
manhood and womanhood unable to write
their names. But as time went on more
attention, in the Northern colonies, was
i devoted to the children's schooling. The
instruction given was slight,
and book-learning was con-
fined to a study of the cate-
WHIRRING SPINNG-WHEEL.
chism and of the
three R's" ("reading, 'ritin', and 'rithme- ,
tic"), while the ferule and the birch rod
played an important part in the school-
master's duties.
There were few wagons for hauling stuff -.-
or carriages for riding. Pack horses were H 77
the only expresses on land; boats and small
coasting schooners ketches and snows, as
they were called carried the heavier
freights and merchandise along the coast '
or up and down the rivers.
Indian corn in the North and tobacco in -
the South were the principal things raised., "
and cultivated. Farming tools and utensils
were clumsy and unhandy as compared with STOPPING THE POST-ID
those of to-day, and it was a long time be-
fore the new farm lands were cleared of stumps and rocks. Many
of the New England settlers were fishermen, and as the years went

THE

ER.

HOW THEY LIVED IN COLONIAL DAYS.

on they built many,vessels for use in the ocean fisheries. Ship-
building, in fact, soon grew to be an important industry along the
Atlantic coast, and only six years after the settlement of New
Amsterdam (New York), a mighty ship" of eight hundred tons
was built and christened the Nieuw Netherlands;" but it proved
so big and cost so much that it
well-nigh ruined the enterprising -
Dutchmen who built it and not for ,
two hundred years after was so great
a vessel attempted in America. -
Where there was so much work
to be done and so few ways of mak- I
ing it easy there was not much time
for rest or sport. People went to
bed early so as to be up early in the ,
morning; but the men and boys
when they could find the time en-
joyed themselves hunting and fish-
ing, while many of them grew to be
hunters by occupation. Deer and
wild turkeys were plenty in the a .:..
woods; wild geese and fish swarmed
in lake and river; foxes and wolves, IN THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.
bears and panthers were sometimes
far too plenty for the farmer's comfort and a constant war was kept
up against them with trap and gun and fire.
Life was rougher and harder then than now and the boys and
girls were not allowed to be wasteful of time or food or clothes.
The beadle and the tithing-man, the town-crier and the rattle-watch
made things unpleasant for mischievous young people, and there
was little of that freedom of association between parents and chil-
dren that is one of the pleasantest features of the home and family
life of to-day. In every village, North and South alike, the stocks

FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN.

and pillory, the whipping-post and ducking-stool stood in plain view
as a warning to all offenders, and as a result people were hardened
to the sight of punishment and boys and girls would even stand by
and make sport while some poor law-breaker was held hand and
foot in the pillory or some scolding woman was doused and drenched
on the ducking stool.
Yes, it was a hard life, judged by our standards, when every one
had to "rough it" in those early colonial days. But though we
may not feel that the good old times" we read about could really
have been so very enjoyable, after all, as we understand "good
times," we do know that to the -ti i --'los and trials, the privations
and efforts, the labors and results of two hundred and fifty years ago
are due the pluck and perseverance, the strength and glory that
made America "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

CHAPTER VIII.

FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN.

F unploughed land and unfelled forests had been the only.
. .' obstacles with which the early colonists had to contend, if
wolf and bear and panther had been the only living ene-
S mies against which they had to struggle, then would the
settlement of America have been as easy a task as is
to-day the starting of new towns in Dakota or Washington, or the
cultivation of the reclaimed lands of Arizona and Idaho. But every
step of the path toward prosperity had almost to be fought for
against foes without and foes within.

FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN

i
I;I
h

'
--- 1~8
~a~?~;J~

The dread of Indian attack was an ever-present terror, and for
this no one was to blame save the white men themselves. From
the very first day of discovery the red men and the
S, white had failed to understand one another. Had
'. Spaniard and Englishmen but met the Indians
,I.'i. \ Iin the spirit of friendship, of justice and of
'i ." I"- helpfulness much blood and sorrow might have
J been avoided. But from the very first the In-
dians learned to distrust the Europeans. The
THI~ CLEA white man's greed for gold and for land made
him careless of the red man's rights and more brutal even than
the wild natives of the American forests; it made him mean and
base and cruel and quickly turned the wonder and reverence of
the Indian to hatred and the desire for revenge.
When the Frenchmen came a second time to Florida they found
the pillar which they had set up to display the arms of France
garlanded with flowers and made an object of Indian reverence;
when the Pilgrims huddled, half-famished, upon the Plymouth shore
Samoset the Abneki walked in among
them with his greeting Welcome, Eng-
lishmen!" and found for them food and
friends; when Maqua-comen, chief of the -
Paw-tux-ents, helped the Maryland colo- .
nists of 1634 to found a home he said: "I I .
love the English so well, that if they
should go about to kill me, if I had so
much breath as to speak I would command
my people not to revenge my death, for I
know that they would do no such a thing -
except it were through my own fault." N TH WATCH.
But this early loving-kindness was short-
lived. The red and white races could not mingle peaceably when
the white man wanted all that he could get and the red man loved,

FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN.

so strongly, the land of his fathers. From Maine to Florida the
war-whoop took the place of welcome and the deadly arrow quickly
followed the gift of corn and fruit. Block-house and palisaded
fort alike became the object of Indian attack and of stubborn
defense, and the hardy troopers and "train-band men" of the

" I WOULD RATHER BE CAR_ _RIED OUT DE SAID STU T. -
"I WOULD IRATHTEtR BE CARRIED OUT DEAD! SAID STUYVESANT.

colonies repaid the horrors of Indian ambush and massacre with
the equal horrors of burning wigwams, the hunt with bloodhounds
and the relentless slaughter of chieftain, squaw and child.
Added to the terror of Indian hostilities was the dread of for-
eign" invasion. With France and Spain alike claiming the right of
occupation, the English colonists could never rest in peace, while,
for the same reason, the Dutch settlements in the New Netherlands
(a section extending from the Connecticut to the Mohawk and from
Lake George to Delaware Bay) were in constant fear of attack by
England. For the New' Netherlands this came at last. When in
1664 an English fleet sailed through the Narrows and dropped

FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN.

anchor before the little fort at New Amsterdam, the stout and stern
Dutch governor Stuyvesant had no choice but to surrender to a
superior force. "I would rather be carried out dead!" he cried
passionately when he saw his duty. But resistance was useless.
New Amsterdam lowered the flag of Holland; the English colors
waved above its ramparts and the New Netherlands became the
Province of New York."
Every war in Europe had its effect in America. The quarrels of
the kings were fought out in the forests and on the shores of the
New World and the wiser treatment of the Indians by the French-
men of Canada always gave
to France the terrible ad-
vantage of Indian allies.
The only exception to this
was the steadfast friendship
toward the English of the
powerful Indian republic
known as the Iroquois, or
"Five Nations" of Central
New York. Their real In-
dian name was Ho-de-no-sau- -
nee or "people of the long
house," so called because of
the great buildings in which
they lived. The French cap-
tain and explorer Champlain, g
had foolishly quarreled with CHMPLAIN ND T IOQUOI
CHAMPLAIN AND THE IROQUOIS.
them in the early days of
European occupation, and these warlike tribes had never forgiven
France, but remained such firm friends, first of the Dutch and then
of the English occupants of New York State, that they were for
years the strongest bar against the French conquest and occupation
of England's colonies.

FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN

In the Old World across the sea France and England had always
quarreled, ever since they had become France ahd England; in
America they quarreled just the same. France said that by the
right of discovery all the land between the Alleghanies and the
Rocky Mountains belonged to her; England asserted that the land
she had taken on the Atlantic seaboard extended westward to the
Pacific and belonged to her. So they quarreled about the land.
Then France was Roman Catholic while England was Protestant,
and in those days Catholic and Protestant were bitter enemies. So
they quarreled about religion. But, most of all, France wanted to
control the fisheries of the American coast; so did England. France
was determined to monopolize (as we say now) the fur-trade of
North America; so was England. So they quarreled about trade.
And when men quarrel with one another over land, religion and
trade, it becomes a pretty serious matter in which neither side will
give in until one or the other is defeated for good and all.
This struggle with France really extended from the first capture
of Quebec by the English on the nineteenth of July, 1629, to its
final capture on the thirteenth of September, 1759- a period of one
hundred and thirty years. The treaty of peace between France
and England, signed in 1763, gave to England all the French pos-
sessions in America east of the Mississippi River, and the bloody
quarrel as to who owned the land came to an end.
The most famous of the Indian wars of colonial times were what
are known as the Pequot War of 1637 and King Philip's War in
1675. They were dreadful times of massacre and blood and held all
New England in terror. But: the colonists finally prevailed. The
Pequot War was brought to a close by the terrible assault on the
village of Sassacus, the Pequot chief, by Captain John Mason and his
men; King Philip's War was ended by the fearless methods of Cap-
tain Benjamin Church, a famous Indian fighter, and the treacherous
murder of the chieftain Metacomet, whom the white men called
" King Philip."

IN TREATY WITH THE IROQUOIS,

FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN.

The dates to be especially remembered in the wars with France
are the burning of Schenectady in the province of New York by the
French and Indians in 1690, the capture of Port Royal in Nova
Scotia by the English in 1710, the capture of the great fortress of
Louisburg on Cape Breton Island in 1745, General Braddock's de-
feat by the French and Indians on July 9, 1755, the surrender of
Fort William Henry to the French on August 9, 1758, the capture
of Fort Duquesne by the English on November 25, 1758, and the
decisive battle on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 in which both the
rival generals, Montcalm the Frenchman and Wolfe the English-
man, were killed and the victory for England closed the hundred
years of war.
Distressing to the colonists as must have been these foes without,
even more disheartening must have been the foes within. For
troubles in the home are the hardest of all to bear. And almost
from the first days of settlement, such troubles had to be faced. As
we have seen, all sorts of people came over the sea to America,
expecting to be at once successful or rich or at the head of affairs;
disappointed, ambition or unsuccessful endeavors made them cross
and jealous and angry with those who fared better than themselves
and those who were the most discontented, because of their own
shortcomings, were always ready to stir up trouble. Then there
were the questions of ownership and the disputes between colonies
as to how far their limits of possession reached; and, quite as hotly
contested as any, were the religious quarrels in which the most
earnest and most conscientious were also the most bigoted and vin-
dictive, answering questions with persecution and arguments with
banishment. Thus was Roger Williams, who differed with the min-
isters of Boston, driven out in 1635, but, undismayed, settled in the
Rhode Island wilderness and founded the city of Providence; thus
was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, the earliest of women reformers, also
driven out from Boston to meet her death from Indian arrows in
the dreadful New York massacre of 1643. Thus were over-zealous

FOES WITHOUT AND TVITIIN.

Quakers whipped "at the cart's tail" by the Dutch rulers of New
Amsterdam and hanged on Boston Common by the Puritan rulers
of Massachusetts Bay; from this cause the "Papists as the Roman
Catholics were called, were imprisoned in Ne'w York; the Baptists
were mobbed in Virginia; Puritans and Papists came to open
warfare in Maryland, and "Dissenters" and Churchmen" broke
into fierce conflict in the Carolinas.
From all this you can see that people in those old
days were not as high-minded, as open-hearted, as
liberal or as kindly-affectioned one to another -
as the Bible has it as are people to-day. Educa-
tion, freedom and union have made us brothers at
last. And, when people are bigoted and narrow-
minded, they are apt to be superstitious and cruel.
Our ancestors of two centuries ago were full of the
oddest imaginations as to good and bad luck; their
fathers had been so before them. They especially
feared the influence of witches. If anything went
wrong an evil spirit, they .said, had "bewitched"
things and at once they hunted about, not to see
why things went. wrong, but what witch had made
them go wrong.
Now so many things went wrong in the early
Colonial days, that the poor settlers begun to think
Sthe witches had followed them across the sea, and
l r when one or two of their ministers in whom they
'A WITC. had perfect confidence said that this was so, of
course everybody believed it and the hunt for the
witches began. It was a dreadful time. In almost all the colonies
innocent people were persecuted or put to death under the supposi-
tion that they were witches and had worked their evil "spells"
upon other people, or upon cattle, crops and homes. But, harshest
of all, was the time in New England when, from 1688 to 1692,

FOES WITHOUT AND WITHIN.

the famous "Salem witchcraft" persecution terrified all the peo-
ple and led to some dreadful tragedies. Twenty persons were put
to death as "witches in Salem before the end came, and the
people slowly recovered from what was 'a disease of the mind
almost as universal as was the grip in 1890.
And, besides all these troubles of mind and body that faced our
forefathers, were others equally hard
to bear. Pirates infested the coast,
robbing and killing, making travel
by sea unsafe and business ventures // / .--
risky, while so, it was asserted -.
men of wealth and prominence t .
among the colonists were partners f'.
in piracy with such freebooters as
Bonnet and Worley in the Carolinas, .. '* ''
Teach or "Blackbeard" in Philadel- -,.
phia and Captain Kidd in New York.
Debts and taxes oppressed the colo-
A FIGHT WJITH PIRATES.
nists as the cost of Indiin wars and
the exactions of the home government; while, as cruel as .;nyllhiiin
in the eyes of a people who were learning to live alone in a great
land, the tyrannical measures of their English rulers, who deprived
them of the rights already granted them by charter and sought to
make them simply money-getters for England, wrought them to the
highest 'pitch of indignation and set them to thinking seriously as
to some means of relief.
But-hard knocks and rough ways, often, we say, "make a
man" of the young fellow who has to undergo them. And so it
proved with the thirteen colonies of England in North America.
The struggle with foes without and foes within made them at last
strong, determined, self-reliant and self-helpful. Bigotry and per-
secution, jealousy and selfishness in time gave way to the more
neighborly feelings that the necessity for mutual protection and

..~.

WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY.

the growth of mutual desires create, the wisdom of a union of in-
terests became more apparent and year by year the colonies came
nearer and nearer together in hopes, in aspiration and in action.

CHAPTER IX.

WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY.

T is the restless people who have pushed the world along.
If every one had been satisfied with his lot or had been
r j willing to put up with things as they.were no progress
would have been possible. Some one must "start things."
z1a And, to do this, he who tries to "start things" must be
dissatisfied with his surroundings or his prospects; he must be
indignant over oppression or injustice or indifference (for not to
take care of people is .sometimes fully as bad as to bully and distress
them); he must be ambitious to advance himself or his fellow men
and determined to better things if he possibly can.
There were numbers of such people who came over to America;
there were still more born and brought up here amid all the
influences toward liberty of thought and action that a new land
creates. They and their fathers had left a world where titles were
esteemed of more worth than character and where there was,. as
yet, too little belief in the truth that an English poet of our day
has put into verse:

Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
'Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood."

V

WORKING TO WARD LIBERTY

When boys get away from home and men from the restraints of
government they are very apt to want to strike out for themselves
and they object more than ever
to any attempt of the far-away
powers that be" to tell them
what they must do amid their
new surroundings or how they
must do it. So, at an early day,
men in America began to think
S about freedom and to plan for a
NEW YORK IN 1690. .
nobler living than was possible in
the land they had left behind. For, when active, earnest people
are really thrown upon their own resources they are bound to think
and act for themselves.
One of the first of such acts was the Virginia Charter of 1618 -
"the beginning of free government in America." This charter
was a paper secured by the Virginia colonists giving them the privi-
lege of dividing the lands they had come to settle into farms which
each man could own and work for himself. It also gave them a
voice in making their own laws and permitted them to say
who should speak for, or represent them in the General
Assembly of the colony. To us who have never known
anything different this does not seem like a great conces-
sion; but it was in those days, when no man was really
free. And King James, like the crabbed old tyrant he
was, was very angry at what he called the presumption
of the people. So in 1624, with the help and at the sug-,
gestion of some of his very wise but very stupid advisers,
he took away all these rights and made the colony a kingly
"province." But the ideas of personal liberty that the ONE OF KING JAMIES'
ADVISERS.
.wise framers of- the Virginia Charter had put into that
early paper lived and became, in later years, the basis for the
Constitution and the Government of the United States of America.

WORJTING TOWARD LIBERTY

The next step toward liberty was a remarkable paper or com-
pact" drawn up and signed in the cabin of the Mayflower by the
Plymouth colonists who, because of their wanderings, have been
called "the Pilgrims." We call it remarkable because it was a
bold thing sto do in those days when the people had so little to say
about their own governing.
As the little vessel lay tossing off Cape Cod on the eleventh of

IN THE CABIN OF THE MAYFLOWER.

November, 1620, the forty-one men who represented the different
families united in the enterprise of colonization, set their signatures
to the following compact which is said to have been the first in-
strument of civil government ever subscribed to as the act of the

WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY.

whole people." Here it is for you to study out in all its curious
old-time wording, spelling and capitals:
In y" Name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwriten,
the loyall subjects of our dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by ye
Grace of God, of Great Britaine, France & Ireland King, Defender
of y Faith, etc. Having undertaken, for ye Glorie of God, and ad-
vancemente of ye Christian Faith and Honour of our King and coun-
trie, a Voyage to plant ye first Colonie in ye Northerne part of
Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly and mutually in ye Pres-
ence of God, and of one another, Covenant & Combine ourselves
together into a Civill body Politick, for our better Ordering &
Preservation & Furtherance of ye ends aforesaid; and by Vertue
hearof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equally laws,
ordinances, Acts, Constitutions & Offices, from Time to Time, as
shall be thought most meete & convenient for ye general good of
ye Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our Names at Cap.
Codd ye 11 of November, in ye year of ye Raigne of our Soveraigne
Lord King James, of England, France & Ireland ye eighteenth, and
of Scotland ye fiftie fourth, ano: Dom. 1620."

Nineteen years later on the fourteenth of January, 1639- the
"freemen" of the three river towns of Connecticut (Windsor, Hart-
ford and Wethersfield) met at Hartford and drew up what is said to
be the first written constitution in the world. This paper did not
recognize the right of any king or parliament to direct the actions
of the people of Connecticut, but held all persons who vere allowed
a share in the affairs of the colony to be freemen. Under the arti-
cles of this constitution the people of Connecticut lived for nearly
two hundred years.
The forms of government gradually adopted by the several col-
onies taught men to stand alone and think for themselves. In
Virginia, as we have seen, it was a General Assembly," or House

WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY.

of Burgesses," as it was more frequently called, elected by the
people. In New England it was what is known as a township "
government in which the people of the various towns taxed and
governed themselves upon a basis settled once a year by the grown
men of the colonies in a coming together called the "town-meeting."
The town-meeting also elected to office the men who were to manage
public affairs during the year. In South Carolina a popular election
in the several parishes or church divisions
/,.a of the colony selected the minister and ves-
trymen of the church and the representatives
,- to the colonial assembly. In Maryland and
SI! \ Delaware the people of the different sections,
:- or "hundreds" as they were called (from
1 the old Roman word for a brotherhood, curia,
!1 1 whence came century, hundred) assembled in
hundred-meetings," enacted by-laws, levied
taxes, appointed committees and helped to
.i'.''. govern themselves. In Pennsylvania the
S.officers of .each local division or county"
S were elected by the people. In New York
'",fi the old system of village assemblies estab-
lished by the early Dutch settlers was con-
tinued by their English successors; this, by
ON1 OF THE VILLAGERS.
direct vote of the people in a sort of town-
meeting, selected the governing body of the town for the coming
year.
So, you see, the colonists almost from the start learned to govern
themselves and were taught the lesson of freedom. But, above the
people, as the direct representative of the English king, stood the
Royal Governor. He was generally a favorite or pet" of the king;
he was as a rule good for nothing as a man and worse as a governor;
and he was sent over to keep the people up to the mark" in the
service of a king three thousand miles away. The king and his

*\^
(
/--
^ii
/ I ,

A LESSON IN LIBERTY.

" They began to think and talk and act."

WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY

governor were certain to have ideas and methods altogether differ-
ent from those held by the people, who knew their own needs and
were not slow to speak up for them. The Royal Governor was, in
the opinion of the colonists, forever interfering in matters which he
could not understand and in which they were deeply interested.
There was, therefore, a continual quarrel going on between the gov-
ernor appointed by the king and the people he had been sent over
the sea to govern.
This quarrel dated from the early years of colonization, and some-
times led to popular uprisings, to blows and blood. When royal
commissioners were dispatched to Virginia in 1624 to take away
the liberties granted by the "charter," the "Burgesses" boldly
withstood them, and, when the commissioners bribed the clerk of
the Burgesses to give up the records, the tempted clerk was put
into the pillory by his associates and had
his ear cut off. In 1638, and again in 1645, 7
William Clayborne in Maryland headed an
armed protest against Governor Calvert and
Lord Baltimore; in 1676 the plucky Vir- S S
ginia colonist, Nathaniel Bacon, stood out
boldly against the obstinate and tyrannical '
Governor Berkeley, and, in what is known as
" Bacon's Rebellion," forced the governor
to terms, but died before victory was fully -
attained, the first popular leader in America. .' .
In North Carolina, in 1678, John Culpepper J
headed a rising against the high-handed rep-
resentative of the absent Royal Governor, who denied the people's
"free right of election;" in 1688 the enraged colonists of the Caro-
linas rose against their governor, Seth Sothel, took away his author-
ity and banished him for a year. 'In 1687 and 1689 the colonists
in Massachusetts and New York broke into open revolt against the
tyranny of the king's representatives, imprisoning Governor Andros

WORKING TO WARD LIBER TY.

in Massachusetts and frightening away the lieutenant-governor
Nicholson in New York. For, at that time, a revolution in England
drove from the throne the despised King James (for whom, when
he was Duke of York, the city and province of New York had been
named) and so mixed up matters in the colonies that it was hard to
tell just who had the right to act. Then the people resolved to act
for themselves. In Massachusetts, after putting the Royal Governor,
Andros, in prison, the people set up a government of their own.
Connecticut saved her much-prized "charter" from seizure by the
king's men by blowing out the
lights just as it was to be taken
away, and hiding it in a tree;
-that tree stood as an honored
relic for nearly two hundred
years afterward and was always
known as "the Charter Oak." In
New York, the people, left with-
out a governor, proclaimed their
IN LEISLE''S TIMES. right to rule themselves and ap-
pointed a patriotic citizen, named
Jacob Leisler, to act as temporary governor. One of the earliest of
American patriots, Jacob Leisler ruled with vigor as the people's
governor." He summoned a popular convention, arranged the first
mayoralty election by the people, made the first step toward union
by attempting a continental congress, and tried to make a bold
strike at the power of France by an invasion of Canada. But he
was disliked by the few aristocratic leaders of New York affairs,
because he would not do as they wished but preferred to act for the
whole people; they combined against him, and when the new gov-
ernor appointed by the king arrived Leisler was arrested, impris-
oned and hanged for treason-"the first martyr of American
independence."
After this, things went from bad to worse," so far as the relations

WORKING TOWARD LIBERTY.

between the people and the royal governors were concerned. There
were grumblings in every colony; there were open outbreaks in
some, and active opposition in all. The governors themselves had
anything but a pleasant time. As the years went on the colonists
grew more and more emphatic in their demand for personal liberty.

THE PEOPLE AND THE ROYAL GOVERNOR.

They saw that the, land they lived in was destined to increase in
importance, population and riches, but they knew that unless they
had their say this growth would be slow or without direct benefit
to them. Their English rulers granted them few rights and looked
down upon them as if they were inferiors. The Americans were

" THE LAST STRA W"

not allowed to manufacture anything for their own use or for sale
in England; the farmers were compelled to send their crops to Eng-
land and purchase what they needed in English markets only.
It is no wonder then that the people grew restless, that they
began to think and talk and act, and that at last they came to the
conclusion that if the King of England denied them the right of liv-
ing honest, honorable, hard-working and upright lives as loyal colo-
nists of England in the land they had settled and cultivated, it was
high time for them to deny the right of the King of England to
have anything whatever to say as to their affairs.
Just then the King of England of that day (whose name and title
were George the Third, and who was a particularly obstinate and
unaccommodating ruler) gave his consent to certain measures that
roused the people of the thirteen colonies to the greatest indignation;
they led to results, too, that were as unforeseen to the Americans
as they were surprising to the pig-headed King George of England,
three thousand miles away.

CHAPTER X.

"THE LAST STRAW."

"- ATIONS as well as boys and men are often all too ready to
play the bully. In 1760 the population of Great Britain
Swas fully nine millions; the population of Great Britain's
thirteen colonies in Amerida was less than two millions.
SIt is very easy for nine millions to say to two millions,
" You shall or You shall not! And they did say it. People
in England talked of the people in America as our subjects." Of
course the Americans did not like this; they felt that they were

" THE LAST STRA W."

quite as good and certainly as wide awake as their relatives across
the sea. And they said so, too.
Then the merchants of England felt that they owned
the colonies. The people of America, as we have seen,
,' i4 could neither buy nor sell except through English
1 traders; they could neither receive nor send away goods
S' except in English vessels; and the right of trade which
had been allowed them with certain French and Spanish
"' "" 'colonies in and about the West India Islands was threat-
ened with withdrawal. The English manufacturers and
traders held, in fact, what we call in these days a monop-
A SMUGGLER. oly of the American trade, and, caring only fpr what
money they could make, were unwilling to allow the colonists any
chance whatever for profit or trade.
This selfish spirit naturally made the Americans very angry. As
a result certain of the colonists said that if England would not allow
them to trade where they pleased they would do it on the sly even
though it was against the law. This
was called smuggling, and England tried
to punish the sailors and merchants who
brought into America, unlawfully, the .
goods they had purchased from people XJ- .
with whom they were not allowed to
trade. But America's coast-line was full _----
of little creeks and bays into which
the smugglers could sail without being -
caught and this illicit trade," as it was -
called, rapidly increased and became very
profitable.- -
In 1759 the long struggle between GUAUNG IE
GUARDING TillHE PORT.
France and England in America was
brought,to an end by the defeat of the French general Mont-
calm on the Plains of Abraham, and the surrender of Quebec in

Canada. The cost of this long-continued strife was frightful. Eng-
lish tax-payers held that as these wars had been for the defense and
benefit of the American colonies, America should pay the bill or
at least a certain proportion of it and also the cost of governing
and defending the colonies in the future. But the Americans did
not think this was just. The wars with France, they said, had been
for the benefit and glory of England. The American colonies were
not allowed the right to choose or have any
one to speak for them in the English Par-
liament, saying who should govern them or
S. how they should be governed. If we can
be represented in the English Parliament,"
: they said, we are willing to be taxed for
our support, but we do not propose to pay
for what we do not get."
S', l The British lawmakers, however, were de-
S termined. They would not yield to the
Desires of the colonists; they made new-
S rules as to the commerce and shipping of
the colonies that were harsher than the
former ones; these were called the Naviga-
tion Acts. Then they ordered that the Cus-
tom House officers in America should have
THE RIGHT OF SEAiRCH.
the right to enter any house at any time
to search for smuggled goods, and, if need be, to call upon the
soldiers for help. This order was called the Writ of Assistance.
Then how angry the colonists were! For they were English-
men in nature and ancestry and they held to the truth of the old
English declaration, that an Englishman's house is his castle,*
,into which no one but himself or his family has the right to
enter uninvited.

This was the decision of a famous English justice, Sir Edward Coke, who, in 1660, said: The house of every
one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defense against injury and violence as for his repose."

" THE LAAT STRA V."

So when the English authorities attempted to enforce these Writs
of Assistance there was a great uproar! The colonists had grumbled
and protested at the other burdens laid upon them, but for the Eng-
lish king to claim the right of invading the home was going too far.
They resisted the Writ; and James Otis, a brilliant Boston lawyer
whose duty it was as one of the lawyers for the Government to de-
fend the service of one of these writs, resigned his office and spoke
in bold and fiery words against the new injustice. "To my dying
day," he declared in this memorable speech, will I oppose, with all
the power and faculties God has given me, all such instruments
of slavery on the one hand and villainy on the other." It was
the first outspoken word for liberty, and roused the people to
enthusiasm.
And yet, angered though they were at England's tyranny, the
colonists hesitated to act. England was the mother country and
resistance was rebellion. They were not yet ready to go so far.
They felt that all they should do was--as
the old saying runs -to "grin and bear -- 2 'M4.
it." But they really could not "grin"-over G ':'-
tyranny and they soon determined not to
bear it. I'
For, one day came the climax. It is the -
last straw in the overburdening load, you
know, that breaks the camel's back. And
in the year 1765, on the eighth of March, King George and his
councilors tried to put the last straw on the overloaded back of
the colonial camel. On that day the English Parliament passed
the measure now famous in history as the Stamp Act.
This celebrated act was but one among a number of measures
adopted by Parliament for taxing the American colonies, but it was
particularly objectionable. It required that all newspapers, almanacs,
marriage certificates, pamphlets and legal documents of every
description should be upon stamped paper or have pasted upon them

`I i~ -. .-- i --I-- -- - i 1

" THE LAST STRAW."

stamps furnished by the English Government and purchased from
the agents appointed to sell them in the colonies. It was consid-
ered as the entering wedge for other tyrannical acts. If the
king can tax our trade," the colonists said, "why not our lands ?"
And from Maine to Georgia the cry arose, No taxation without
representation." People do not object to pay taxes when they
themselves order the taxes and are benefited by the money that
comes from such taxation; but to be taxed without a word to say in
the matter and to be forced to pay, no matter how objectionable the
method and manner of collection, makes people angry. And so the
people of America broke out into loud and rebellious words. James
Otis in Massachusetts and Patrick Henry in Virginia, and other
speakers of prominence and influence aroused their hearers to a
pitch of enthusiasm; local rivalries were forgotten in the general
indignation; the demand for a union of the colonies in opposition
to the tyranny of England was universal; acts of violence and
insubordination against the stamp agents and the English gover-
nors and officials were committed in every colony; patriotic asso-
ciations called the "Sons of Liberty" were formed; and on the
seventh of October, 1765, a Colonial Congress, consisting of dele-
gates from nine of the thirteen colonies, assembled at New York
and adopted three protests against taxation-one of these they
called a "Declaration of Rights," one "An addressto the King,'
and one a "Memorial to Parliament."
This wide-spread opposition on the part of the colonies, the
refusal of the Americans to buy or to use the stamps, their agree-
ment with one another not to import, buy, use or wear any article
of English manufacture until the Stamp Act was repealed that
is, declared by the English Parliament to be ro longer in force -
exerted so great an influence in England, especially upon the mer-
chants who saw that this stand of the Americans would cause them
to lose both trade and money, that in 1766 after much debate and
many bitter words, the English Parliament repealed the Stamp Act.

" THE LAST STRA W."

The result was received by the colonists with the greatest joy;
but when they learned that, in place of the Stamp Act other meas-
ures had been adopted for raising money from the colonies by
taxation, without granting them representation or securing their

PREPARING FOR "HOMESPUN" CLOTHES.

consent, the people again protested. Thereupon the English
government sent soldiers across the sea to see that the tax laws
were enforced and ordered that the people should pay for the board

" THE LAST STRAW."

and lodging of the soldiers who were sent over to force them into
submission.
This was too much. New York refused to provide for the soldiers
sent to that province and Parliament, as a punishment, took away
the colony's right to hold its own legislature. Massachusetts
urged the colonies to call another congress for self-preservation and
Parliament ordered Massachusetts to recall its action. When the

UNWELCOME LODGERS.

colony refused its legislature was dissolved and four regiments of
soldiers were sent to Boston to keep the town in order.
This was in 1768. From this time on things grew worse and
worse. The people hated the soldiers as the representatives of
England's tyranny. The soldiers already treated the people as
rebels. From words they came to blows. On the eighteenth of

", THE LAST STRA E"

January, 1770, the citizens of New York made the first stand against
the king's troops in a street fight known as the Battle of Golden
Hill and on the fifth of March, in the same year, an unexpected
fight in King Street, Boston, developed into the bloody brawl that
has since been called the Boston Massacre."
Everybody was aroused. It looked very much as if war was at
hand. But Parliament, fearing that it had perhaps gone too far,
took off all the taxes save one that on tea.
But this was adding insult to injury. The American colonies
were not making their firm stand to save money but to gain their
rights. It did not matter what was taxed or how much it was taxed.
What they resisted was any tax without the right of representation.
They refused to buy tea. They refused even to drink it; they
-drank, instead, tea made from sage or raspberry-leaves, or other
American plants. New York and Philadelphia sent back the tea-
ships unloaded. Charleston stored the tea in damp cellars and
spoiled it. In Boston the British men-of-war blocked the way and.
refused to let the tea-ships out of the harbor. A great public meet-
ing in the Old South Church requested the Governor to let the tea-
ships go back and, when he refused, fifty men disguised as Indians
rushed to Griffin's Wharf, boarded the tea-ships and smashed and
flung overboard three hundred and forty-two chests of tea. This
occurred on the night of the sixteenth of December, 1773, and has
ever since been known as the "Boston Tea Party."
Enraged at this open defiance Parliament ordered the port of
Boston closed that is, said that no ships could go in or out and
the business of the town was well-nigh ruined. This was called the
Boston Port Bill. The other colonies stood up for Boston; they
sent it aid and supplies and cheering words and, one after another,
the thirteen colonies agreed to neither buy nor sell to England (to
"boycott" it, in fact, as we say to-day) and to join in a general
congress.
This congress of the thirteen colonies since known as the First

" THE LAST STRAW."

Continental Congress-assembled at Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia
on the fifth of September, 1774, and petitioned the king and Parlia-
ment of England to restore the rights they had withdrawn. But it
was of no use. King and parliament were stubborn:
The war is inevitable, and let it come I repeat it, sir, let it

A WEAK-KNEED PATRIOT AND HER SLY CUP OF TEA.

come! cried Patrick Henry in Virginia in that famous speech which
every American- boy, and, I hope, every American girl knows by
heart. The war was inevitable. It had come at last.

THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM.

CHAPTER XI.

THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM.

EBELLION is the open or armed resistance to lawful au-
thority. When that resistance is successful it is Revolu-
tion. You see, now, why we call our war for independence
Sthe American Revolution. It was a successful rebellion
S against English authority, and completely changed or
" revolutionized" the government of the people of America.
There were many dark and bitter days before the rebellion became
a revolution, but the story of the struggle is full of interest. You
have already seen how the trouble grew, as, passing from objection
to protest and from protest to insubordination, it developed at last
into open defiance,' resistance and war.
When Samuel Adams of Boston (the "prophet of independence"
as he has been called) declared in the Old South
Church "this meeting can do nothing more to save
the country" and cheered on the make-believe In-
dians to the "Boston Tea Party," the American
Revolution began. From Maine to Georgia people
began to talk of war, and when the English Par-
liament rejected the proposals of the Continental
Congress of 1774, the spirit of rebellion was ready i
to burst into a flame.
It takes but a spark to set the tinder ablaze, and
the spark came at last. The cabinet of King sAL ADMS.
George declared as "traitors and rebels" all who
were disloyal to the king; war-ships and soldiers were dispatched
to Boston which was declared to be "the hot bed of rebellion;"

THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM.

and the Royal Governor, General Gage, was ordered to seize or
destroy all munitions of war held by the colonists and to fire upon
the people should he deem it necessary.
Acting under these orders General Gage seized the arms and
powder stored in the old powder house on Quarry Hill (in the pres-
ent city of Somerville) three miles
from Boston and took secret meas-
ures to seize the stores at Salem and
n.! '%*-., I
-- at Concord.
S '- Now as these stores and munitions
S- of war were the property of the.
S.province of Massachusetts it was held
.. that the king had no right to take
"iS them and after the seizure at Somer-
ville the provincial congress--as the
z "rebel" legislature of the province
called itself -determined to save
These stores for its own need. A
PAUL REVERES RIDE mob of indignant patriots frightened
away the small force sent to Salem
and some one* told the Americans 'of the secret designs upon the
stores at Concord and the two signal lanterns hung in the belfry
of the Old North Church of Boston gave warning of the plans of
the British.
Then it was that Paul Revere made his famous night ride from
Boston to Concord to arouse the farmers against the British designs.
Of course you all know Mr. Longfellow's splendid poem "Paul
Revere's Ride," telling how this brave- "scout of liberty" spread
the news. Just read it again, right here, to refresh your memory
and then you will understand how excited the people were and how
the "minute men" from all the country round caught up their

It is said that this some one was no less a person than Mrs. Gage, the wife of the Royal Governor. She
was an American woman and said to be friendly to liberty:"

THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM.

arms and hurried to the highway that led from Boston to Concord.
These "minute men" were colonial militia men pledged to be in
readiness for any call to arms, and prepared to march when the
warning came -" at a minute's notice." They came; and on Lex-
ington Common and by the North Bridge at Concord they struck
the first blow for liberty.

"You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled;
How the farmers gave them ball for ball
From behind each fence and farm-yard wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load."

Eight hundred "red-coats," as the British soldiers were called,
marched from Boston on the eighteenth of April, 1775. When
they reached Lexington Common half an hour before sunrise on the
nineteenth of April between sixty and seventy minute men were
drawn up "just north of the meeting-house" to
resist their advance.
"Disperse, ye villains! ye rebels, disperse! lay
down your arms! Why don't you lay down your
arms and disperse?" called out Major Pitcairn, the
leader of the British advance.
The minute men of Lexington were sixty against
eight hundred. But they were not there to disperse. "Too few
to resist, too brave to fly," as Mr. Bancroft says of them, they
simply stood their ground.
"Fire!" shouted Pitcairn, and under the deadly discharge of
British muskets seven of the "rebels" fell dead and nine were
wounded. Then the British marched on to Concord.
But their leader Colonel Smith saw that the country was roused
and that he should have to fight his way back. He sent at once to

1 31(41pI~CC--"~*-----~-`--1

THE FIRST BLOW FOR FREEDOM.

Boston for reinforcements and nearly two thirds of all the red-
coats in the town were hurried off to the help of their comrades.
Meanwhile these comrades had marched on to Concord. There
they found but few of the stores they had been sent to destroy.
Two cannons were spiked in the tavern yard; sixty barrels of flour
were broken in pieces; five hundred pounds of ball were thrown
into the mill pond; the liberty pole was cut down and some private
houses were broken into. That was all. A hundred or more sol-
diers were sent to guard the North Bridge across the Concord River
and, while there, the minute men of Acton, led on by the school-
master, marched down the hill to
S -. the bridge. The British soldiers,
i'. seeing the colonists coming on, be-
gan to tear up the planks of the
'bridge; the Americans broke into
a run; the British fired and the
schoolmaster fell dead. Then
Major Buttrick of Concord cried
About, "Fire, fellow soldiers!" and
S"Fire, fire, fire echoed his men.
They fired; two of the British fell;
the rest turning ran toward the
.. main body of the "invaders" and
-^ "" the minute men held the bridge.
That was the battle of Concord!
THE BRIDGE AT CONCORD.
TH BRIDGE A CONCOR. For the first time the long-suffer-
ing American colonists had turned upon their tormentors and there,
by the flowing Concord River, as Mr. Emerson says, they

Fired the shot heard round the world."

Colonel Smith and his eight hundred red-coats turned toward
home. From every point the minute men hurried to the highway

THE BRITISH ARE COMING!

" The whole country round was now fully roused. Minute men came from every direction."